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Thursday, September 05, 2013

My Favorite Uncle Bobby Story

My
Uncle, Elder Bobby Rider, passed away this past week. He was a lovely man. He served as an SDA pastor and conference worker all his life, continuing to preach the gospel and minister to others long after he retired. He was a gentle good-humored man whom I always
admired.At Friendship Camp one summer, I
saw an example of his low-key leadership style in action. It was a
typical Lone Star Camp Summer - damp East Texas heat that sapped the energy out
of you. We, camp staffers ran around in soggy cutoffs all day and beat the heat
by hitting the lake, whenever we couldn’t stand it any more. Running from
classes to meals to camp councils, you didn’t have time to change, so we stayed
wet most of the time. As a result, most of us suffered from a condition known
by the indelicate euphemism, “Crotch Rot”.

You get “Crotch Rot” through a
combination of an energetic life style and damp blue jean cutoffs. The guys
that wore regular bathing suits never had this problem and you would think the
rest of us would have figured it out. But it was the 60's and cutoff blue jeans
were what everyone was wearing, so, like fashion slaves in every generation, it
never occurred to us to go out and buy swim trunks. Swim suits where what you
wore if your mama packed your clothes for the summer. Instead, we just fought
the rash as best we could and endured constantly damp shorts for the sake of
being like everyone else, a practice we thought of as expressing our
individuality. Most of us accepted rot as a normal condition of camp life and
dealt with it without complaining. You slept naked and Vaseline was your best
friend. Sleeping in the nude was the most widely accepted treatment for crotch
rot and only caused us concern on one occasion that I remember.

During the summer of 72, I bunked with the
bachelor waterfront staffers up at the old North Cabin, a screened lodge
overlooking the row-boating area at the upper end of the lake. It was a lovely
spot. We had an indoor fireplace, huge shuttered screens that we kept open to
compensate for the lack of air conditioning and steel WWII surplus U.S. Army
hospital cots with extra long legs that lifted the mattress to the same height
as the windows. The tall beds allowed us to sleep directly in the cross draft
between the two 15 foot wide screened windows - one on the lake side of the
cabin and one on the side facing the road. The high beds also meant you were
entirely visible from the paths on either side of the cabin. This might have
been a problem except that all of us worked on the waterfront and to a man had
contracted varying stages of crotch rot. The discomfort associated with the rot
had taken us long past caring about trivial things like personal privacy.

My roomies, Tim and Bill and I had
developed a system that allowed us to sleep naked (part of the prescribed
treatment for “The Rot”) without disturbing the delicate sensibilities of the
young lady staffers who had, in an explicable outbreak of administrative trust
in our youthful dedication to abstemiousness, been assigned to a room in the
northernmost wing of the lodge.

The new boarders next door needed to be
able to get past our windows and around to their cabin door without being
flashed, so we made allowances for their delicate sensibilities and tilted the
roadside screen so that it was mostly closed but still allowed the breezes from
the lake to pass through the cabin, while still blocking the view of the girls
passing by. Then, we warned our new neighbors to stay off the lakeside path
around the cabin in the early morning and to use the slightly longer (and less
"scenic") front path to get to their cabin door.

As far as I know, we had no problems that
summer with Peeping Thomasina's (at least no one actually lodged a complaint)
until Friendship Camp, when Mrs. Overby moved into the north wing. Mrs. Overby always
came as a volunteer during the annual charity camp and was a regular feature of
the hot East Texas summers--like drought and mosquitoes. As a Christian and a
Goldwater conservative, she heartily disapproved of our hippie lifestyles, our
music and our long hair. Of course, we gave her the standard warning about the
lakeside path, and congratulated ourselves on being quite thoughtful and
reasonable young men. Mrs. O., however, took exception to our sleeping attire
and having to walk round the front path to get to her door. She had two
impressionable and very proper young ladies staying with her that summer and
the mere idea of three Bohemian nudists lounging about the next door cabin,
cooling their chafed thighs in the night breezes filled her with Victorian
horror. She decided to complain.

Now, every summer, Mrs. Overby went
ballistic over some perceived outrage that one of us had committed and there
was a sort of pool going about how many days she’d last before she’d lose it
and come stalking up the trail to the camp director’s office in her flowered
frock and Minnie Pearl hat to complain about us heathens next door.

Uncle Bobby was the Texas Conference Lay
Activities Secretary at the time and the one charged with organizing the
weeklong camp for underprivileged kids. At his right hand was my aunt, the
famous and feared Hattie Lee, who believed in a strict hierarchy of command and
required instant obedience of us camp staffers. She put on a stern front, but could be incredibly kind and thoughtful as well. The two of them made an incredibly powerful management team.

One morning halfway through the week, I ran
into Uncle Bob talking to a couple of pastors out by the cafeteria. He
motioned me over and told me Mrs. Overby had been to see him.

"She’s complained about you guys
sleeping in the nude and wants it stopped immediately!” Uncle Bob said sternly.
Next to my roommate Tim (who later became a pastor himself and actually worked
for Uncle Bob), I was the one most intimidated by authority figures. I shifted
uncomfortably on the hot sand, more from embarrassment than from the heat on my
bare feet. I figured Aunt Hattie had passed along orders for us to immediately
cease from “sleeping nekkid” and all such other ungodly behavior.

Uncle Bob let me squirm a bit, then
broke into a broad grin. “Weeeeell,” he winked at the other snickering pastors.
“I figured Mrs. Overby and the girls weren’t going to have a whole lot of other
excitement up there this week, so I didn’t worry about it too much,” he
chuckled. To my amazement, he never said anything else about it. I waited
anxiously throughout the rest of the week. I just knew Mrs. O. would go over
his head to my Aunt Hattie, but to my relief, I never heard another word about it.

I told the other guys about the complaint.
Partly in fear of my Aunt Hattie, Tim & I adopted a basic beach towel loincloth for our sleeping attire. The
loincloth was a compromise between modesty and comfort. It looked like a
standard loincloth worn hanging over a leather belt strapped around the hips -
kind of like Tarzan. You could drop the flap in case of emergencies or raise it
up to catch the breeze. Bill, an ex-Army medic who’d just come back after
serving a tour of Vietnam and tended to
be a little jumpy, refused to compromise at all and continued to sleep
crotch-to-the-wind as usual, except that he inexplicably began leaving a light
on beside his bed at night. He may have been using heat from the lamp as a
drying agent. We weren't sure. Bill was a little scary sometimes, so we didn’t comment
on this unusual practice. On being told of our half-hearted compromises and
realizing we were younger and had more energy to put into the struggle over the
nudity issue, poor Mrs. Overby gave up complaining. I think she was afraid we’d
stage a protest and burn some undergarments or something. Anyway, she chose to
cope with us by refusing to even acknowledge our existence for the rest of the
week. I don’t think she ever spoke to us again, at least not that I can
remember.

Nothing else interesting happened the rest
of the week until Mrs. Overby’s young roommates startled a sleeping water
moccasin on the lakeside path at 3 o’clock in the morning the last night of
camp. They said they had quietly sneaked out to the ladies’ shower building early, so
as to enjoy a warm shower and so as not to wake Mrs. Overby. Coming back, they claim to have "accidentally" taken
the wrong path in the dark. On the trail, they saw a "snake". Startled by their flashlight, the "snake" apparently rushed at them, and then crawled off into the bushes. At least that’s how
they accounted for all the screaming and giggling outside our window in the
middle of the night. The girls weren’t bitten, but their screams startled Bill
who sat straight up in bed, decided the V.C. had sneaked inside the perimeter
and reached instinctively for his M-16. Not finding it, he swatted the bedside
lamp into his lap instead. Unfortunately for Bill, the lamp was still on. The
light bulb was also naked. Fortunately for Bill, the layers of Vaseline
protected him from serious injury. The bulb made a little sizzling sound and
then blew out. The snake, as far as we can tell, got away clean!

I'm sure Uncle Bob heard about it, but he
never said anything to us, though there was a lot of snickering and meaningful
looks among the pastors the next morning at breakfast.

Uncle Bobby was a problem solver of the
first order. The previous summer at Friendship Camp,
we had a larger number of campers than usual. These were under-privileged kids
that churches throughout the state paid for so that they could attend summer camp
at Lone Star. I was rowing instructor that summer and the first morning of
Friendship Camp, I came to rowing class and found 27 campers crammed on the
benches ready and waiting to go boating. I had 5 boats and 9 life-jackets. When
I polled the group, I found that half could not swim at all. The other half
couldn’t speak English. I delivered the safety drill and sent as many kids, as
I could get lifejackets on, out in 4 boats with two each aboard. No one got
much on-the-water time that day and someone, probably the counselor, who had to
sit on shore with the kids that were waiting for their turn, apparently complained
bitterly to my Aunt Hattie.

Meanwhile
I compared notes with my buddy Mark over in canoeing and discovered he had the same problem I did. While we were having a
good old gripe about it, Aunt Hattie came by. My Aunt Hattie is something of a
force of nature. She was dreaded and feared throughout the conference by all evil-doer’s
and shirkers. Even I was a little intimidated by her and I was kinfolk!She promptly order Mark and I to "take
all the kids out on the water the next time."

“Without
life-jackets?” we asked incredulously. We’d seen most of the kids’ swimming
prowess demonstrated, usually after they fell into the water getting out of the
boats.

“You’re
both being insubordinate,” she snapped.She spun on her heels and went looking for Uncle Bob. We ran into him
later in the day and he called us over. My Uncle Bob, always a problem solver,
asked us if we could handle the group if we had enough life jackets. We
shrugged and said we supposed so, but we wouldn’t be able to do much teaching
with that many kids.

Here I
learned a most powerful life lessons.

Uncle
Bob smiled at Mark and I in that benign, pastoral way of his and asked, “Can you make sure
they have fun?”

My
Uncle Bob changed the way I thought about camp and teaching and almost
everything else I ever did in my life. He drove straight to town and bought
enough life jackets for everyone and the next day, Mark and I dutifully loaded
the kids up in every boat we had that would float (and in some cases gave brief
instruction in the fine art of bailing) and set sail with the most ragged,
overloaded and joyful flotilla of campers I ever worked with. We kept the kids safe
and we made sure they had fun. That was the point of the whole thing, after all
as Uncle Bob explained to us.

In the
process of solving the problem, Uncle Bob managed to praise our concern for
safety and at the same time to help us understand what we were really supposed
to be doing with those kids. Then off he went to town to fix the problem. The
lesson lasted me the rest of my life. Whenever I faced a problem or difficulty,
I always hearkened back to Uncle Bob's question. "Can you make sure they
have fun?" He never had to say, "Think about the real reason you're
here." He didn't lecture.He just
grinned the way he always did and asked the question we should have been asking
ourselves – "What's the point of what you're doing?"

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